People Have Been Experiencing Disappearing iTunes Movies

I’ve been seeing reports and reading peoples’ experiences today complaining about disappearing iTunes Movies. The reason? The studio behind them is removing them from the Canadian version of the iTunes Store.

As da Silva and others have pointed out before, the “Buy” button in digital stores is, at best, mislabeled. You cannot truly buy any digital thing online; you can only rent it, and any online video store is little more than an expensive, glorified, extremely convenient Blockbuster. In conclusion, let’s go back to DVDs. We have requested comment from Apple and will update if we hear back.

The problem is that digital ownership isn’t the same as physical ownership. Despite using a “Buy” button, it can still be argued that you’re renting it. They can remove your iTunes Movies, but not your physical DVDs.

Wow. Probably in the EU they will require a warning that before you “buy” a movie now, that it may disappear in the future.
I think my buying days are over now. Will stick to renting. I’ve bought movies and found that I might only watch every 5 or 10 years, so might as well just rent.
Really, this is not buying, but you are paying for a license. It’s extended renting. Potentially. I imagine if you bought one day and the next week it disappears…

So the button should say instead of “Buy” it should be “Extended Indefinite Licensing to Watch Product.”

This is a super important question. If the answer is you can keep playing your downloaded version and you have the DRM key to keep it unlocked and playable, then I see no problem with this. You got what you paid for, and you cannot expect Apple to keep giving you the courtesy of constantly re-downloading it.

However, if they basically make your downloaded purchased items unplayable, this is pure copyright evil.